: : : : Look! For an English native the gradability can possibly be
considered easy, but not for other origin peoples, for instance the Latins's origin.
:
: : : To realize how difficult it is, take a glance at the site about gradable
and ungradable adjecitves modifiers on the site:http://www.edict.com.hk/funcgrammar/NonGradable/Participles.htm.
:
: : : Thanks, HCD

: : : Your question doesn't actually seem to be about adjectives
in general. I took a look at that site, and the crucial point they're making is
about present and past participles when used adjectivally - are they gradable
or not? The conclusion seems to be that participles originating from an intransitive
verb root are non-gradable, as are transitive-based participles where there's
an implied causal agent.

: : : I'm not sure whether I buy into all that or not,
but it's probably a good rule of thumb. There are of course exceptions, as there
are to so many grammatical rules - it is correct English to describe someone as
"having a rather sunken face".

: : HCD, it's easier to learn English by being
exposed to large amounts of it than to learn it from grammar books that assign
words to categories that have names. I grew up speaking English. I went to school
in the US. I had never heard of "gradable" and "nongradable" before.

: : It
seems that a gradable adjective is one that refers to some quality that there
can be more or less of. "Pretty"--one painting can be prettier than another. You
shouldn't have to memorize lists of adjectives. What matters is the meaning of
the word. Just translate the English adjective into your own language and decide
whether it means something that can be quantified.

: R. Berg, I agree with you
that you possibly never have heard about gradable and ungradable adjectives and
adverbs because you learned the American English, but please, take a look at the
British English grammar, "Advanced Grammar in use", from the Cambridge University
Press, by Martin Hewings, printed in 1999 or 2000, chapters 83 and 92.
: Thanks,
HCD

...and that's the crux of the matter. You're both right, of course. Native
speakers of a language don't tend to learn its grammar. They just pick it up instinctively
as they use the language every day - correctness by imitation, if you like. However,
in order to learn a foreign language, you definitely need to have some awareness
of its grammatical rules and structure, and the depth of your knowledge depends
on how rule-bound the language is, and how much it differs in that respect from
your native tongue.

I was taught languages (Latin, German, French) the old-fashioned
way, with a heavy focus on grammar, and this is the only reason that I have some
objective knowledge on grammar as it is applied in English. This has been helpful
in many ways, but the way I was taught has a downside. It tends to leave one with
an ability to write perfectly in the foreign language, although maybe overly correctly,
as you might find in a legal document or a novel from 150 years ago. However,
when it comes to speaking the language, it tends to leave you tongue-tied, because
you're too aware of all the rules and try to work them into your dialogue, even
if most natives might not even bother with half of them in speech. It wsn't till
I'd spent time in both France and especially Germany (the Germans having a very
rule-heavy language) that I became anywhere near fluent in either language. Modern
teaching methods focus far more on the spoken language, with its resulting upsides
and downsides. There's probably a happy medium somewhere between the two.